Category: Writing Prompts

Patricia Smith is known for her work in traditional form, and even more for stretching form to its limit. For example, the poem “Elegy” in Incendiary Art is a triple sestina, and the poems featured in this issue are parts of a triple crown. (That’s 45 sonnets!) How might you innovatively and generatively expand a traditional fixed form?

The first section of Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead imagines at length a heaven for Black boys “who never got to grow up,” “who shot another boy to here,” whose names were replaced here on earth “with a hashtag.” Who would you write a heaven? What would it look like and how would it work?